• Meet ‘Flame’, The Massive Spy Malware Infiltrating Iranian Computers (Wired)
• Even in Coal Country, the Fight for an Industry (NYT)
• The Amazon Effect (The Nation)
• False Fronts in the Language Wars (Slate) see also “The Life of Slang” by Julie Coleman (Washington Post)
• The Top 10 Twitter Gaffes (Lakestar Media)
• More on the Politics of the Super-Rich (The Monkey Cage) see also The small but important group of super-rich funders of the Democratic party (The Monkey Cage)
• Woman pens heartfelt essay for her graduation class, than dies in a car accident Keegan: The Opposite of Loneliness (Yale Daily News)
• Craig Venter Wants to Solve the World’s Energy Crisis (Wired) see also Craig Venter’s Bugs Might Save the World (NYT)
• The Truth Is Out There: From The 1985 NBA Draft Lottery To The Olympics To Game-Fixing … Which Conspiracy Theory Can You Believe? (The Post Game)
• MUSIC: Meet The New Boss, Worse Than The Old Boss? (The Trichordist)

Please use the comments to demonstrate your own ignorance, unfamiliarity with empirical data and lack of respect for scientific knowledge. Be sure to create straw men and argue against things I have neither said nor implied. If you could repeat previously discredited memes or steer the conversation into irrelevant, off topic discussions, it would be appreciated. Lastly, kindly forgo all civility in your discourse . . . you are, after all, anonymous.

15 Responses to “10 Sunday Reads”

My head is still spinning from the sports (esp basketball) fixing article. Basketball is obviously the easiest to fix but fixing a lottery drawing is a lot more challenging.

I thought there would be a bias towards a 7 game vs 6 game championship series and the team with the bigger TV market would almost always magically win the sixth game to force a 7th game (at home) but my perceptions must have been set in the Celtics years because there are many more 6 game series than 7.

re the graph: not very meaningful, as it does not take into account the growth of the workforce since ’91. I’d expect this graph to look different if it plotted number of jobs added divided by size of the workforce, including “discouraged” workers not counted in government numbers.

Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty by Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson.Acemoglu and Robinson discern a simple pattern – when elites are held in check, typically by effective legal mechanisms, everyone else in society does much better and sustained economic growth becomes possible. But powerful people – kings, barons, industrialists, bankers – work long and hard to relax the constraints on their actions. And when they succeed, the effects are not just redistribution toward themselves but also an undermining of economic growth and often a tearing at the fabric of society. (ht Simon Johnson)

Why is the graph titled “slow but steady”? The recovery slope from the low point is identical to the ’90/’91 recovery prior to the start of the dot com bubble. The 2001 recovery bottomed much later, and then only recovered at a slightly better slope because of the housing bubble. We don’t have, and probably don’t want a bubble this time. The recovery looks excellent when put into context.

The problem we have is the much higher starting point in terms of unemployment, but that is another issue, and is probably largely a structural aspect of the economy now.

Lot of this exists in SF literature. Now coming closer to reality.
————How to Become the Engineers of Our Own Evolution
The “transhumanist” movement says better technology will enable you to replace more and more body parts–even your brain

* By Abigail Tucker
* Smithsonian magazine, April 2012

The reports regularly come in from around the world: U.S. engineers unveil a prototype bionic eye, Swedish surgeons replace a man’s cancerous trachea with a body part grown in a lab, and a British woman augments her sense of touch by implanting self-made magnetic sensors in her fingertips.

Adherents of “transhumanism”–a movement that seeks to transform Homo sapiens through tools like gene manipulation, “smart drugs” and nanomedicine–hail such developments as evidence that we are becoming the engineers of our own evolution. Enhanced humans might inject themselves with artificial, oxygen-carrying blood cells, enabling them to sprint for 15 minutes straight. They could live long enough to taste a slice of their own 250th birthday cake. Or they might abandon their bodies entirely, translating the neurons of their brains into a digital consciousness.

Transhumanists say we are morally obligated to help the human race transcend its biological limits; those who disagree are sometimes called Bio-Luddites. “The human quest has always been to ward off death and do everything in our power to keep living,” says Natasha Vita-More, chairwoman of Humanity+, the world’s largest trans­humanist organization, with nearly 6,000 members.

MUSIC: Meet The New Boss, Worse Than The Old Boss? (The Trichordist) Great detail on the financial pressure on musicians. I was wondering why forty year old music cost an much as current hits on itunes, but why would Apple cut their margin.

I have been in the music business since 1975 as a manager and concert promoter. Thanks so much for the link to the article abou the new boss vs. the old. I remember signing one new band to A&M records in the late 80s for the following: $250,000 recording budget for first record, $275,000 for the second guaranteed vs. a 13% royalty rate. They were also able to keep 100% of their publishing. In addition the band got $50,000 for tour support per album plus $75,000 to shoot a video. And this does not include the cost of A&R, radio promotion, advertising etc. They ended up selling less than 40,000 units per release. Obviously the success of STING and other hit artists helped A&M gamble on this new band and offset their losses. Artist development is really suffering as a result of the new realities. My festival and concert promotion business is still profitable but declining. This is not just true of the music industry, today I glanced at the Dover NASCAR race on TV and the stands seems half full. Shocking!

The key difference in this job graph from Business Week versus others that portray job loss and recovery (like the one from Calculated Risk) is that Business Week measured job growth from the trough. By measuring from the trough they have completely eliminated the number of jobs lossed from the equation. Many more jobs were lost in the most recent recession than in the prior. Even with greater numbers of jobs added since the bottom, we are still well behind 2001 in terms of returning to pre-recession employment. This job graph is data-spin at it’s worst.

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Ritholtz has been observing capital markets with a critical eye for 20 years. With a background in math & sciences and a law school degree, he is not your typical Wall St. persona. He left Law for Finance, working as a trader, researcher and strategist before graduating to asset managementRead More...

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